Huge Scale Of Road Camera Surveillance Revealed

The massive scale of surveillance cameras on the UK's roads has been revealed in new figures obtained by Sky News.

Automatic number plate recognition - or ANPR - technology uses cameras to scan number plates and log car journeys.

Whenever a car passes a camera, its registration is scanned and added to a central database, accessible by police forces.

For one week in October last year, it took roughly 34 million images each day. They were added to a database that now contains at least 22 billion records. All records are kept for two years.

Police are checking that database more and more. In 2014, they made 300,758 searches in this database – up from 194,317 in 2012.

The Information Commissioner's Office has raised concerns over these new figures.

Jonathan Bamford, head of steric liaison at the ICO, told Sky News: "You've really got to ask the question about the extent of ANPR and the amount of records that it's collecting.

"There are a lot of people going around on their ordinary day to day business doing nothing wrong, innocent individuals - those are being acquired at the rate of 30 million or so a day and being retained for a number of years.

"You end up with a picture where there's not a lot of our lives taking place which the state can't gain access to in some ways. So it's very, very important that there's a proper public policy debate about the extent of surveillance in the United Kingdom."

ANPR was originally introduced in Northern Ireland for counter terrorism operations.

A national system was introduced in March 2006.

Since then, the number of records has swelled, from 35 million records in 2006, to 7.6 billion records in 2010, to more than 22 billion in 2015.

The national ANPR network now receives data from 9,000 roadside cameras.

These new figures, obtained under freedom of information laws, were only released by the Home Office under the threat of legal action.

The Home Office also refused Sky News's requests for an interview.

Instead, they gave this statement: "The Automatic Number Plate Recognition system is a valuable source of intelligence and evidence for police in the prevention and detection of crime.

"Its use is subject to strict safeguards in the Data Protection Act, as well as the Surveillance Camera Code of Practice."